"Nothing Is Easy"

Kill Rock Stars

Artists:

In the video for her 2008 song "Ruler", Marnie Stern played Rocky. The fictitious Philly boxer was a fitting kindred spirit: Stern writes from the perspective of the underdog, the late bloomer, the ragtag mortal with a serious case of god-envy. Her idiosyncratic guitar playing echoes this, too. Some guitarists emerge herculean, their technique as natural and seamless as Apollo Creed's uppercut-- but Marnie Stern is not one of those guitarists. You can almost hear the anxiety, the energy, the hours of sweat channeled into her finger-tapped fury. She makes songs about the difficulty and the triumph of pushing past your own limits, which take on extra emotional resonance because it sounds like she's pushing past her own while she plays.

The aptly titled "Nothing Is Easy" has all the frenetic energy you'd expect from a Marnie Stern song, though, without longtime drummer Zach Hill's spazzy eruptions, the canvas is a little sparser than usual. That's not to the song's detriment, though. It only makes it feel that much more intimate (like when her voice leaps to the upper reaches of her falsetto to break that last word in half over her knee: "Nothing is ea-sy.") Halfway through she gives herself a breather, slowing her galloping fingertaps to a leisurely strum, but before long she's back to the hard stuff and the challenge at hand. Which, she's proven by now, is the way she keeps pushing her sound forward-- and beating her own personal best.